Walk Away
by misskikimarie
Summary: "A bullet with your name, a ticking time grenade. You better run away, run away, run away." Zander remorsefully faces the fact that Stevie is gone, reflecting on how exactly this sad reality came to be as Kacey sings a song she wrote about the occurence in order to get revenge on the people who drove Stevie away in the first place. Zevie. Rated T for implied mild adult content.


**This story is based off of the song Walk Away by Dia Frampton. The song is actually based off of a true story about a nine year old girl and her eleven year old sweetheart. Unfortunately, the girl was given to her father's friends for entertainment, and her father allowed it. She ended up being raped and ran away. No one knows what happened to her, but Dia is friends with the boy she had loved, and, after hearing the story from him, she decided to write the song in order to get the revenge the girl deserved. In this, Stevie plays the nine year old girl, Zander plays the eleven year old boy, and Kacey, in a way, is supposed to be Dia Frampton. Also, since Stevie runs away, Gravity Five never existed, but Kacey did become a solo artist.**

**Summary: "A bullet with your name, a ticking time grenade. You better run away, run away, run away." Zander remorsefully faces the fact that Stevie is gone, reflecting on how exactly this sad reality came to be as Kacey sings a song she wrote about the occurence in order to get revenge on the people who drove Stevie away in the first place. **

**Fandom: How to Rock**

**Pairing: Zevie (Z/anderxSt/evie)**

**Genre(s): Romance/Angst**

**Status: Complete (One-shot)**

* * *

"Excuse me."

The sound of an artist speaking brought the crowd's attention to the girl as opposed to the conversations they seemed to be participating in throughout the bar. One specific pair of brown eyes looked up and gave a sad smile at the sight. He knew the girl, and he knew what she was planning on singing. The subject always filled him with memories of the past that caused him such deep remorse that it was like he was tied down by the trauma, and it would never stop cutting his heart up into smaller and smaller pieces.

The girl had curly, dark brown hair and dark skin to match. Even though she was normally a very peppy and optimistic person, her eyes seemed to have darkened from their usual sparkling, chocolate brown to nearly black. He supposed she was haunted by what the song was about as well, despite the fact that she hadn't actually been that involved and only found out about what happened when they became friends. It was the kind of story that could make anyone feel pain wash over them even without full understanding of the situation. And that was what inspired her to write about it.

"I'm going to be singing a new song of mine that I wrote with a friend," she informed the audience, making eye contact with the man when she said friend. He wasn't very difficult to find because they were in a rather quaint bar. There weren't too many people, yet it wasn't desolate. No one was really drunk either, though some may have had one or two drinks. Everyone seemed relatively happy. "It's called Walk Away," she stated before sitting on a little stool she had set up for herself and beginning to strum her acoustic guitar.

_"Looking back on younger days, the time has passed,_  
_And nothing stays the same. Hey hey hey!_  
_She was such a pretty girl, with glowing eyes and yellow curls. Hey hey hey!"_

The man, Zander Robbins, smiled a bit, thinking back to his sweetheart who he hadn't seen since he was eleven and she was nine. She hadn't been blonde; actually, she had had short, chestnut hair, but Kacey, the singer, had always imagined her being a blonde with bright blue eyes. He had tried to tell her of the girl's hazel eyes and how the forest-like orbs had captivated him, but it was her imagination that she had decided to bring into the storyline instead of the facts. If she brought in all of the facts, it just wouldn't be very Kacey Simon-like. There would be no happy ending after all. And Kacey had full faith in happy endings, even when there was little to no hope for one.

Just like for him and Stevie.

That had been her name. Stevie. Originally, he had questioned it and told her that he thought that that was a boy's name. She had folded her arms across her chest, stared at him hard, and told him it worked both ways. Her name was short for Stevanna. He guessed it was a combination of names like Annamarie or Marybeth.

He had questioned many things about her at first. She was two years younger than him, but her actions still caused the gears in his mind to churn. Unlike the rest of the girls in her class, she had no pretty bows or nice dresses. She had ripped jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers that were just barely enough to be considered shoes. The soles flopped when she would run and the laces were all over the place. They appeared to have been white, but they were so dirty that they looked brown and black instead.

And it wasn't just her appearance that had him so confused. Well, maybe confused wasn't the right word. Perhaps wonderstruck fit his feelings towards her better. Anyway, she also didn't like dolls or fairies. Nor did she get excited about things like getting the chance to do her nails and put on her mother's lipgloss. Instead, she would run off with her friend Nelson and sometimes Zander's own friend named Kevin to go play soccer- even though the two boys were never very good at it- or sometimes even pokemon. She wasn't into the card game that much, but she was far more fond of it than the girly junk all of the other girls were into.

He had come outside and seen them squatting down on the ground with the cards in their hands. Nelson and Kevin had been furrowing their eyebrows and wrinkling their foreheads in concentration in order to seemingly try and figure out what their next move would be while Stevie had simply set down her card and waited patiently. Zander raised an eyebrow at the scene and walked over, coming up behind Stevie and asking her mockingly, "They're _so cute_, aren't they?"

She had turned to face him with a glare and nearly elbowed him in the stomach, but he had backed away just in time to dodge her fiery response. Then, noticing something interesting, he had come closer once more. "Hey, wait. Why don't you have any of the pink and fluffy ones?" he questioned. The first card of hers that he had noticed was not at all what he had been expecting. Reading the name at the top, he realized it was called Crobat. It was a dark purple vampire bat with permanently narrowed, red and yellow eyes. As if it didn't appear creepy enough, there were several of them on the card, some in a group flying closeby, and then three hanging upside down from the branches of a tree in the somber night, ominous-looking clouds hanging above head. He looked at the rest of her cards and noticed that they _all_ appeared pretty threatening.

She, in response, rolled her eyes and explained, "I got these cards from my brothers. They didn't have that many _'cute' _ones, and I traded Nelson and Kevin most of the ones they did have."

He looked at Kevin's cards since he didn't know Nelson that well. "Seriously, Kevin? Igglypuff?" he asked in disbelief.

"Iggly_buff_," Kevin corrected, trying to make the pokemon sound cooler... even though it was a round, pink thing with gigantic eyes. "_Buff_: as in manly!" he defended himself.

Zander and Stevie had both chuckled, knowing that it was still one of the least manly things they had ever laid their eyes on. Then Zander turned to Stevie again. "So why _don't _you like the pink and fluffy ones?" he questioned.

Stevie laughed and told him, "If I wanted pink and fluffy, I'd hang out with _them_." She motioned to a group of girls from mixed grades who were dressed in clothes way too mature for their age. Instead of fuzzy sweaters and jeans that their mothers picked out for them, they were dressed in miniskirts, blouses, and dresses that all pretty much matched. It was like they all had some sort of color scheme planned in advance, which they probably did. Some were even wearing wedges. None were allowed to wear high heels yet since they were still in elementary school and that would be ridiculous (or, as they would say, "ridic"), but wedges were still taking things a bit too far. Some of them were even already wearing makeup.

Zander scrunched up his face in disgust. They called themselves the Perfs, and they were always gossiping and complaining. Like one time in gym class (Zander's second favorite class falling only behind music, of course), Molly Garfunkel, one of the Perfs that were "top in command", had been complaining about ruining her manicure or breaking a sweat so much that the coach couldn't take anymore and made everyone run laps instead of playing dodgeball (one of Zander's favorite games!). And, worst of all, Molly was excused from even participating, so she wouldn't have to worry about her little sweat problem.

"I see your point," he had said, and Stevie smiled. He thought that her smile made her look beautiful, even though she had only been seven years old at the time, so he smiled back.

_"She's waiting for her Superman, her Never land,  
Cause he can show the way. Hey hey hey!  
Where's her missing piece her mind's been chasing, chasing?"_

Zander realized that he had been so caught up in the pleasant recollection that he hadn't been paying attention to Kacey's singing. He had only missed out on a short part though, so he didn't feel too guilty about missing a part of her performance. It was just that practically anything could make him zone out and think back to Stevie sometimes. It was so hard having someone you loved, even at such a young age, and not being able to talk or see them anymore. He didn't even know where she was, but, if he did, he was pretty sure he would chase her down like he did once when she was eight.

She had come out for recess dressed in a pair of washed out jeans, a maroon T-shirt, and black converse with her short, brown hair a bit messy. She was rubbing her head and her coppery locks furiously, and he wasn't sure if she was angry or just confused, so he walked up to her and asked, "Hey, Steves, what's wrong?"

She had looked up at him, immediately recognizing the nickname she had only allowed him to address her by. "Nothing, we just had a super hard math test. I think I failed," she told him. Despite being a pretty carefree person most of the time, she had cared a lot about her grades. It amazed him how dedicated an eight year old could be about school.

"You're in second grade. No math is hard then," Zander had teased, and Stevie punched him lightly on the arm. Rubbing his arm where she had hit him, he had told her with mock hurt, "Ouch, Stevie. That was so mean."

She had grinned and joked right back, "Okay. So why don't you tell on me? The teacher's right there." She had pointed to her teacher, Mrs. Rabsath. She was a slightly pudgy with auburn locks, big, blue eyes, and a makeup caked, round face.

"Nah, I don't want to be a tattle tale," he replied. Then he added, "Plus she scares me." It was true. Most people were either afraid of her or just strongly disliked her because she was angered pretty easily. Some people even questioned if she was just faking being married because no one believed that there was any person out there who could stand her for more than a minute at the absolute maximum, let alone the rest of their life.

Stevie laughed but then frowned again. "If I didn't do well, then she'll _kill me_," she stated, and Zander shot her a look of empathy. Even though he hadn't found second grade to be all that hard, especially when compared to the math they had had him doing in the fourth grade, he had had Mrs. Rabsath too back when he was her age, and he definitely knew her wrath. Everyone did whether they had had her as a teacher or not.

"I know how to cheer you up," Zander told her, and she looked up, curiosity evident in her eyes. He smiled, and put his baseball cap on her head. It fell down in front of her eyes and covered her frizzy hair. While she pulled it up to stop it from obsucring her sight, Zander had hastily tagged her, shouting, "You're it!" Then he dashed in the direction of the playground, so she wouldn't be able to tag him back.

She crossed her arms over her chest but smiled all the same and started running after him a second later. "Zander, you get back here!" she had yelled. "I don't even like the Mets!" she had said loudly enough for him to hear, referring to the hat he had given to her. "I'm a Yankee fan!"

They had spent the rest of their recess going back and forth chasing one another and laughing hysterically. Eventually, Kevin and Nelson had joined in. Then a bunch more kids, including Grace King. She was a Perf though, so her so called friends had pulled her out of the game to stop her from getting sweaty and dirty. Plus, she was almost tagged by Andy Bartlet, and _that _would have been horrible to them.

Zander chuckled at the memory, and the bar tender sent him a curious look, but he just shrugged it off.

_"A bullet with your name, a ticking time grenade,  
You better run away, run away, run away  
Either way you're screwed, there's nothing you can do,  
You better run away, run away, run away."_

Another memory began to come to mind, but he quickly pushed it away because he started to think about _that _day. Instead, he focused on a couple dancing happily to the music. Despite the true sadness behind the lyrics, Kacey had decided to keep the song friendly and catchy with lots of rhyming, repeating, a cheerful beat, and a backtrack of whistling after each time she sung the chorus.

But when a bit more light flashed on the couple, he began squinting and noticed what appeared to be some faded cuts on the girl's arms. She had a bright smile on her face, but there was a bit of a sad look in her eyes, and the man had the same look. They held each other close, and Zander noticed their wedding rings which surprised him a bit because the girl appeared as if she could be only eighteen or nineteen while the man looked to be in his early twenties. They seemed pretty young to have been married.

And yet they still seemed perfectly content. The girl, who had long, red hair, leaned her head on the man's chest and smiled softly as she closed her eyes. The man kissed her on the head gingerly and ran a hand through his own thick, black hair. Zander couldn't help but laugh lightly because of how far the man had to lean down. There was a clear height difference between the two, but neither of them seemed to mind.

When he began focusing on the faded marks along the girl's arms again, the bartender noticed his staring and gave him a light nudge on the shoulder, asking if he was alright. Zander looked up at him and told him, "Yeah, I'm fine. Thanks." But he couldn't help wondering what had happened to the girl. Did someone hurt her? Did she inflict the pain on herself?

It appeared as if she had healed for the most part no matter how she had ended up getting hurt, but Zander though back to the somber look in her eyes and asked himself, _Do I look like that to people?_

He always tried to avoid thinking of Stevie, but he knew that when he talked to the women whom his friends had set him up on dates with that he had to have some sort of glum or troubled look because they always questioned if everything was alright. Did he look like _that_? Like he had convinced himself that he was healed, but deep down he knew that he really wasn't? That he was broken?

Well, he did always feel more complete when Stevie was around...

_"She's tellin' tales through telephone  
That make you cry, chill to the bone. Hey hey hey!  
It's lock and key, electrified,  
Hide and seek from dirty eyes. Hey hey hey!"_

This time, Zander couldn't stop himself from thinking back to that horrible day.

They had become best friends later in Stevie's second grade year, and soon after that was when he started noticing changes in her behavior. He had gone to her house one day to talk to her and see if there was something troubling her. He hoped that Mrs. Rabsath hadn't given her a hard time again because she hadn't gotten as good of a grade on that test as she had wanted, and Mrs. Rabsath had been breathing down her neck and all up in her business about bringing her grade back up after that for nearly a month.

Instead of walking all the way up her driveway towards the door, he had been frozen to the spot in shock when he heard the hollering of what seemed to be a group of grown men and a high pitched scream come from her house. The sound reverbrated in his mind until he finally found himself able to move again, though he was still a bit shaken up. Maybe he had gotten the address mixed up?

He looked through one of the windows and nearly gasped at what he saw, but he quickly covered his mouth so as not to make any sound. Inside, a man with shaggy, brown hair and dark scruff around his chin was fighting with Stevie. She was trying to close a door to a closet in order to hide from the man, but he was trying to open it back up. He was obviously winning, but Stevie was putting up a pretty good fight for such a scraggly little girl. The thing that shocked him the most though was the fact that she had tears in her eyes, and... well, she was shirtless. Zander felt kind of bad watching while she was half naked, but he was too worried about what was happening to care all that much.

Zander continued watching, gripping the window frame as harshly as he could to stop himself from screaming. He would duck down whenever someone looked in his direction, but, otherwise, he continued to watch the scene playing out before him. The man smirked when he finally got Stevie out of the closet, whereas Stevie started kicking and screaming in protest when he grabbed her. Then, more men came in the room with funny looking glasses that Zander had remembered his mom calling beer bottles. Apparently, they were very bad for you. That's why his parents always tried to keep them out of the house.

He only stopped staring when one of the men started fumbling with the zipper to Stevie's blue jeans. He wasn't entirely sure what was going to happen, but he had a horrid feeling lingering in the pit of his stomach that it wasn't going to be good. He had ripped his eyes away from Stevie, and then his hands came off of the window frame. He noticed that his grip had gotten so hard that his palms had started blistering, but he paid them no mind as he ran away from the house. He didn't do anything but run, even when he could feel his lungs screaming for air. He ran and ran and didn't stop until he got home where he locked himself in his room and stared at the ceiling, not sure how to react to what he had just witnessed.

Sometime later, Zander's mother had knocked on his door and told him, "Zander, phone call." Only then did he come out from his room. He shakily took the phone from his mother and thanked her before going back inside to the safety of his room.

"Hello?" he asked as he sat down on his bed again, sitting criss cross applesauce.

"H-h-hi, Z-Zander," a voice stuttered from the other line. It sounded like they were crying. "It's S-S-Stevie."

Zander's mouth had opened, but he found himself at a loss for words. He had tried to forget what had happened, but it seemed as if the universe simply wouldn't left him. Had Stevie seen him outside the window? He was so sure that no one had seen him. And it turned out that, as they eventually continued speaking, she hadn't actually seen him. She had wanted to talk to him because she trusted him with her secret, and she was feeling broken.

_Broken._

"Z-Zander?" Stevie asked. She had been stuttering less and less as their conversation had gone on, but she still had a hard time saying his name for some reason.

"Yeah?" he responded. While she was having trouble speaking clearly, he was having trouble speaking in general. His responses had never been over a few words the entire time.

"Can I come over?" she had nervously questioned. "I need some c-comfort right now..."

"Sure," Zander had replied. He felt like he needed her there too. Seeing her being hurt by those men... It was _traumatizing_. He could only imagine what she was going through.

_"Driving in the rain to somewhere far,  
But they've got tattoos stamped upon their arms, of her name in hearts  
She doesn't understand that love is what you give, not given up.  
Hey hey hey!  
Where's her missing piece her mind's been chasing, chasing?"_

Whether Stevie hadn't understood that he was willing to give her the love she needed or that she was just too scared to stay: Zander would never know. But, a little while after her ninth birthday, she had left. As in run away to never be seen again. By _anyone_.

Zander thought that she was healing before she left though. The men had turned out to be her father and some of his friends, but Stevie's brothers (she had one that lived with her and her father, but he was only a toddler, then she had one that her mother had taken into her own custody when Stevie's parents had gotten divorced, and the other two were attending Prinston) had come back from college, so he figured that she was safe again. It turned out that he was wrong or maybe she was okay on the outside, just not on the inside. That was also a mystery to him, and it hurt how little he truly seemed to know about the story of her disappearance after all.

After that point, Zander had found himself tuning Kacey's song out a little bit. She started singing the chorus again and from there she began to sing lies because it became about Stevie going to get revenge on the men that had hurt her. Sadly, she never actually did get any revenge on them whatsoever. Zander and Stevie's brothers certainly had though because they were all so heartbroken when she had run away that they became infuriated, and theose men had been the easiest people to blame for what had happened. In fact, Zander and Stevie's brothers still stayed in touch, texting and calling each other from time to time, but things were a bit awkward when they did talk because the only thing that truly connected them was gone. Stevie.

_Stevie_, Zander thought suddenly when he noticed someone talking to the couple he had been watching earlier. She definitely resembled Stevie except for the fact that she was obviously grown up, and her hair was longer. Plus, despite her mainly chesnut-colored locks, the woman also had some blonde stands framing her face. It could have been Stevie, but, as soon as the idea popped into Zander's mind, he began to doubt it. What were the chances that Stevie would actually be there?

But then he saw her eyes. They had that same broken look, and they were a deep forest green with tiny flecks of brown in the center. _Hazel. _Plus all of her features were the same if not just a bit more defined. Despite his previous doubts, he was now certain that this was her. She was back.

Zander began walking towards them.

"I've gotta go," he heard her tell the couple, trying to speak above Kacey's music. "I'll see you guys later." The man and woman nodded their heads as the girl then proceeded to start walking towards the door but not before walking into Zander who was not about to let her leave again. "Hey, watch where you're going!" she exclaimed as he helped her off the ground.

_There's that fiery personality that I love_, Zander thought and grinned. When he did, the girl furrowed her eyebrows, seemingly deep in thought before her eyes widened.

"Zander?" she asked in disbelief. "I-is that you?"

"Stevie," Zander replied, answering her question just by knowing her name. Her mouth went agape slightly and she took a small step back as if she couldn't believe that they were both meeting again. Zander knew that he certainly couldn't believe it. "I thought I'd never see you again."

He wanted to ask her where she went and why, but, for now, he just wanted to hold her, so he stepped closer to her and placed his hands on her arms. He found out that she had some scars there just like that other woman, but he didn't question that either. He knew that they all probably had scars in one place or another and that the ones on her arms weren't nearly as bad as the ones on either of their hearts. So they held each other. And slowly, their wounds did seem to heal, though everyone knows no scar ever goes away. They'd always be broken, but together, they realized, they were as complete as they could ever possibly be.

It wasn't the happiest ending, but it certainly was the happiest either of them had been since they were in elementary school together. And they were just glad that they were together again. Neither of them had walked away from the past they shared, and they were intent on intertwining their futures now that they were both back.

She was back.

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**If you liked this, please review. If you didn't... please be gentle. I'm trying to get back into the swing of writing and this just popped into my head. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it. This is probably one of the longest things I've written during the time I've been on this website, so I really put a lot of work into it, and I can't wait to see you at my next update! Oh, and check out the song Walk Away by Dia Frampton! It's really awesome. She's such a great artist, and, a lot of the time, she writes her song about true stories or literature, which I think is pretty cool. Her songs rock.**

**Stay classy, my darlings!**

**#SaveHowtoRock, #SaveHTR, #SaveVICTORiOUS**


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